Setting a different home page in WordPress

The default for WordPress is to have the blogs page as the “home” page – logical considering that’s the primary intended use for WP. However now that we’re making wider use of this wonderful platform, we sometimes want to have a static home page – as for this website.

You can tell WordPress to take your visitors to your static “home” as follows:

Create a new page – call it Home (or Hello or Welcome, or whatever you want really – as a standard, though, we all know that the Home page usually gives us a good starting point for a website) and publish that page.

If you are going to include a blog, create another page and title that “Blog” or “News” or whatever you want – publish that page too.

Then in your WordPress Dashboard, go to Settings, Readers, and then choose your new, chosen page to be your “front page” to display, and also select the new blog/news page for your Posts page.

Save Changes, and your mostly set.

With some design themes you may find that this leaves you with an extra “home” page in your navigation; it may be that your chosen theme has a Home link coded into the header.php file, so you then have to remove that piece of code. Either ask someone of a geek persuasion to quickly do that for you, or have a look yourself. I found the WordPress support forum topic on eliminating one of two “home” buttons useful. Basically, from within your Dashboard, you need to go to Appearance, Editor and select the Header.php file (usually – not always, but most often) and find a line of code, between <li>…</li> tags that includes the text Home. Now if you’re not sure about this at all, don’t touch it and ask me to pop in and take it out for you.